Ellipsis Redundancy and Reduction Redundancy

1 Focus and anaphoric destressing Consider a pronunciation of (1) with prominence on the capitalized noun phrases. In terms of a relational notion of prominence, the subject NP she] is prominent within the clause S she beats me], and NP Sue] is prominent within the clause S Sue beats me]. This prosody seems to have the pragmatic function of putting the two clauses into opposition, with prominences indicating where they diier, and prosodic reduction of the remaining parts indicating where the clauses are invariant. (1) She beats me more often than Sue beats me Car84], Roc86] and Roo92] propose theories of focus interpretation which formalize the idea just outlined. Under my assumptions, the prominences are the correlates of a syntactic focus features on the two prominent NPs, written as F subscripts. Further, the grammatical representation of (1) includes operators which interpret the focus features at the level of the minimal dominating S nodes. In the logical form below, each focus feature is interpreted by an operator written .